Linkbait 9

Luke Wroblewski asks: What is a smartphone. He isn’t looking for the industry definition, but rather for the opinion of web people. His classification is coming along nicely.

Research shows that, when asked to allocate the value of a monthly mobile subscription, smartphone users value browser highest, and voice second-lowest. Browsing as the killer application? Would be cool.
The service where the allocated value least resembles the data traffic share is video: people tend to be meh about it, but it consumes 48% of network resources.

The unspoken truth about managing geeks is a useful look at how to manage an IT department (or a web shop), and how geeks work: they’re logical, and judge everything on whether it solves a problem or not. Above all, it’s about respect that must be earned and cannot be conferred by an org chart.

Useful tool for testing your application’s response to the various HTTP status codes. The tool simply sends the requested status code, along with any required headers, and, if necessary, a body.

NFC (for payments) is coming to “most” BlackBerries this year.
Additionally, T-Mobile announced it’s going to roll out a mobile wallet for RIM, Samsung, Apple, and LG devices this year.

Jason Grigsby publishes the comprehensive guide to mobile statistics, linking to all important sites that regularly publish mobile stats. Important overview.

Foursquare goes S40. Clearly the social networks are leading the way in adoption of feature phones.

In Belgium operators and banks have reached an agreement on mobile payments. They are currently investigating development of this service, which will likely launch later this year. The idea is to make the mobile device an electronic wallet for payments to a maximum of €25. Both SMS and NFC will be used for validating the purchase.

A translation of the HTML5 spec for web developers. All rules that apply to browser vendors have been removed. The result is a very readable document.

The second dot-com crash is underway. Portents of yet another apocalyptic end-time are proliferating like mushrooms in a wet autumn. Facebook’s going public will be the sign of a last frantic money-grab, after which the valuations of social media companies will drop sharply.

According to Ewan McLeod Facebook could become a competitor for network operators. Although I must admit I don’t quite get his point, he rightly points out that while operators may bitch about the amount of data traffic Facebook generates, they do not want it to discontinue its mobile strategy. Still, Facebook is a threat to the operators’ pathetic attempts at a content strategy (attempts they should discontinue as soon as possible).
Money quote:

A much more exciting point would be Facebook deciding that the mobile operators are getting in the way and lease or buy it’s own mobile operator capacity to deliver next generation services to its users that operators are either unwilling or incapable of doing themselves.

I still think Google is more likely to do this than Facebook because it has more technical expertise and deeper pockets. Still, it’s only a matter of time before one of the Internet giants becomes an operator because the current crop of operators has no fucking clue what it’s doing.

A fun look at phone demographics. Totally unscientific, but a lot of truth here.

Apple’s new rules are upsetting developers, too, in addition to content publishers. Apple’s problem is that this is such a narrow-minded money-grabbing move that it’s almost impossible to defend. My guess is Apple will slightly relax the rules in a month or so.